Good Titles, Bad Titles: What Title of Your Post Says About You

A couple of decades ago ( ), I did empirical research about how librarians thought about titles. Back then librarians were really the most advanced information scientists. In fact, they probably still are — except that today, people who are almost completely illiterate do not realize how stupid they really are (mainly because they’re also ignorant ).

Today there are basically 2 kinds of blog post titles:

1. SEO title posts (written for people who type in questions)

2. Answers (basically telling you what the detailed post says)

You can easily recognize either of these. Something that begins in “How to” or “34 Ways to…”, or maybe “What you need…”, etc. are all written to match a search query… — and 9 times out of 10, they will not contain a useful answer (and that doesn’t matter to the authors, because they really only want you to click on the ads on the page ). Such titles are bad because they’re misleading and a waste of time. They are very widespread in retard media.

The other kind of title — the one that already tells you what the “answer” is — act more as an invitation to delve deeper into a topic, if (and only if) the answer is something that you wish to know more about. If you are not interested in this topic, then that doesn’t matter to the author, because then you are not really in the author’s “target audience”.